Remind me again, why anyone thought it was a great idea to have a businessman as the political leader of our nation?  That was it, wasn't it...it's what everyone was saying, he'll be great, he knows how to run a business therefore he will know how to run a government.  I also heard....he's rich, therefore he's successful,  and because he's good at being successful he'll know how to get the best deals for America.  Finally there was this gem, he's rich, and therefore he won't be able to be bought by special interests.

If what we have seen so far has not yet convinced you that the above arguments have more holes in them than a block of swiss cheese then I don't suppose my thoughts are going to sway your views. That said, let me rehash some of the most glaring problems with those arguments.

First, I don't think anyone gave any real thought to the idea that there are different types of business leaders because there are a lot of different types of businesses and the experiences those industry titans acquire and then put to use running various sorts of business enterprises are not necessarily interchangeable from business to business.   For example, business entrepreneurs who run their own business or company have no one else to answer to.  They do what they want, say what they want, they sink or swim based on their own actions.   The skills required to run your own show are not the same as the skills and responsibilities of the CEO of a large corporation.  That businessman has lots of others he answers to, especially a board of directors and shareholders of the company. None of the companies Mr. Trump has run required him to answer to anyone but himself. He has not ever known the responsibility and the give and take required of a CEO who has to work with a board of directors or to worry about shareholders.

Next there is the question of Mr Trump's wealth and the idea that because he is mega wealthy we should all assume he will be a great President.   The first and most obvious problem here is that we don't really have a good understanding of just what his wealth amounts to or how he got it.    We can guess, we can assume, but really we don't know if he is worth millions or billions and he clearly doesn't want to share that information with the rest of the country.  

Running a business is NOTHING like being President.  If you run a business you are not obligated to listen to anyone else, you can do your own thing, all the time, every day.  You don't have two other branches of your business telling you "no, you can't do that!' That is especially true of a private business which has no board of directors or share holders to answer to.  Donald Trump has never run a business where he had to answer to anyone other than his own inner voices.  No share holders, no board of directors....just him, so it's probably been a big shock to realize he doesn't always get the last word in his new job.

Successful, he's been magnificently successful they said....but did anyone stop and consider the obvious...a successful football player is not necessarily a successful baseball player, or ball room dancer, or doctor.  If you dentist was a great dentist who had built a large and successful dental clinic and had hundreds of patients who adored him would you then assume he'd be the guy who should do your orthopedic knee replacement?  Of course you wouldn't....so why on earth would you think that being a successful business tycoon translate to a great President?    

Will he make America great again?  That remains a question but I'm not hopeful....

The man in the white apron and a photo album mystery.

A while back I was looking at an old photo album which had, I think, belonged to my grandmother.  Most of the pictures in it date from the teens through about 1940.  This one really caught my attention.  Why is the buggy hanging from the side of the barn?  Who are those guys and what are they doing?  Did someone play a practical joke on them?  Why is the guy wearing an apron?

Then I realized there were four other pictures on the next page that all had something in common with this one...they all showed the man in the white apron.   Being the self appointed family historian I am familiar with the faces of many, if not most of the faces I see in the old family photo albums.  Partly because many times names had been noted on the pictures, or I had asked my grandma about them.  The guy in the apron, him, I did not recognize.  In fact there were several people who appear in that group that I did not recognize, but I felt like there was some sort of story being told with that series of images and I wanted to know what it was.  Of course, anyone who could have told me what was going on in those pictures, and who the men were was long gone from this world and I had failed to ask the question when I had the opportunity.

 
If I were to place the images in some sort of order that seems to make a story this would appear to be the logical one to follow the buggy.
Same guy wearing the white apron and the same hat, but still I don't recognize him as any known relative. I don't know a lot about horses, but this looks like a good one.   I'm still having trouble making a story, but clearly, when you look at the third image it appears the first two pictures have come together, the buggy has been put to use, and there is that same apron guy, but with a new face next to him which is
no more familiar than apron guy, Now however the location is  clear to me.  It is the farm of
 my great grandparents and after them, my grandparents.  None of those buildings remain today.  A fire in 1928 took the house and some of the outbuildings, another fire in about 1960 took the big barn seen in the first picture.   However I have seen enough pictures of those buildings that I knew where this story was unfolding.

 My grandparents built another house on that very spot where the big house stood after the 1928 fire and having spent much of my childhood there I could probably walk to the very spot where that horse and buggy are sitting in this picture.

The last two images that appear to go with these three and were quite possibly taken the same day provide a bit more of the story.  In the first one the man with the apron is

standing in the open doorway of a building I knew to have been a two room combination summer kitchen and workshop which sat near the big house. In later years my grandfather had a garage in about that same location.   Maybe this explains the apron. He's been working in the summer kitchen.
The second man in the buggy picture is seated in a chair leaning against the side of the building apart from 4 younger men are seated on a bench, all unknown faces in a photo album where most of  the faces were relatives that I recognized from having spent years looking at family pictures.  Finally, the fifth and last picture that appears to have been taken on that day appear to be the same group of men, plus some family members I recognized.  My great grandmother seated in the back on the far right, my grandfather is seated with the men, on the front row, second from the right and three of his four sisters are on the porch.   That's the east side porch, so I know this was taken in the morning.  Was it a threshing crew?  I thought that was possible.  Hired hands?  I didn't think that was as likely.  After my great grandfather died in 1914, and even before he died they did often have hired hands, but it was usually only one or two at a time, not a crew of this size.  I figured since great grandfather was not in the group picture on the porch these must have been taken sometime after his death in 1914, but not too long after that because my grandpa's youngest sister doesn't appear more than about 8 or 10 years old in that porch picture and she was born in 1907.

Now this is where a little serendipity comes into play. Solving old photo mysteries don't usually happen this easily.  I was looking at a story in the life of my great grandmother and her family, but I didn't quite have the whole picture.  

I remembered that I have a Farmers Account Book that had been kept by my great grandfather and after his death by my great grandmother.  They noted things like the date they planted corn, dates and the amount they paid someone to work, amounts farm goods were sold for, weather, birth dates and names of new colts and that sort of thing.  I wondered if maybe I'd find some clue in that account book which runs from about 1907 to about 1918.

Sure enough I found a note made by my great grandmother on Friday April 9, 1915.  She noted: "Men moved goods into old house to begin work on stone road, Mr Edd Steeley and Jim Standford contractors. Rented old house and west side of cow barn for $8.00 a month and they are to put in grade for my driveway."  The crew was still there in June when she noted "men not getting much done on road on account of rain."  I really did not expect to figure out the meaning of those 5 pictures, but I believe the presence of that road crew, renting the old house during the summer of 1915 is probably what they are all about.  "The old house" she described was the summer kitchen/workshop seen above.   It had been part of the original house built on that location about 1850.   The rest of the old house had been torn down but those two rooms were moved into the position seen in these pictures when the big house was built in 1911.  I'm supposing the man in the white apron was the designated cook for the crew.  Incidentally, it turns out the first picture did not depict some unusual practical joke.  Some further investigating showed me that farmers often stored "seasonal" modes of transportation in the hay lofts of their barns.  That buggy would have been a summer/fair weather rig.  It is probable that during the summer, if they owned a sleigh, it would have been stored up there too. I still don't have names to put with the faces, but I think it is safe to call them "The Road Crew of 1915" and that 1915 was the year my great grandmother got her crushed stone drive and the county road out front was improved from dirt to gravel.

What this Country Needs

We need to find some definitions that we can all agree on.  It is no wonder we can't solve problems in this country.  We can't even agree on what the problems are.  We all look at things from a different angle, some of us wearing rose colored glasses, others wearing magnifying glasses, and some wearing bifocals. Worse yet we can't even agree on simple definitions.  

For example, there is a lot of talk about the demise of the middle class in America.  But what is "middle class"?  Depending on what the definition of middle class happens to be I recently discovered that I am either poor, wealthy, right in the middle of middle class, or something even less descriptive called "thriving" which is, I suppose, something that is supposed to be good.  

Various academics and economists have argued that middle class should be defined by income,  others say consumption is a better yard stick, or wealth, or demographics or aspirations.  I fall at completely different places on each of those yardsticks.   So if we can't even agree on the definition of middle class, how can we know if we have a problem or know how to solve the problem if we have one?  I don't even know if I'm middle class or something else.  If I'm not middle class am I wealthy?  It most often doesn't feel that way, but some yardsticks say I am.  I guess it goes back to perspective, and if perspective is what makes the difference then I don't see a simple solution to the problem....or even if there is a problem.   

Maybe the definition of Middle Class is like the definition of hard core pornography, we can't easily define it, but like Justice Potter Stewart famously said in his 1964 opinion in Jacobellis v Ohio,  "I know it when I see it".  

For the record, I do see the demise of the middle class as a problem.  Regardless of how you define middle class when you remove a person from the middle he has to go somewhere else, either on the poorer side or the wealthier side of middle. Actually it isn't the person who moves, it is his money.  For the last 20 or 30 years more who might have once been considered middle class have moved toward the poorer side of the middle. At the same time vast amounts of wealth has flowed out of the middle toward the wealthy at much higher rates than wealth has moved the other direction.  Like Potter Stewart, I may not be able to describe all the ways this is bad for our country, but still, I know it's not a good thing. There are just some things that you know without the need for deep and involved definition. Our economy is like an engine, and just like an engine, when things get out of balance bad things almost always result.     

ACROSS AMERICA

I Like to travel, in fact you could say I love to travel. The destination isn’t particularly important to me. Granted, I do have some preferred destinations, but my enjoyment derives as much from “the trip” as the final destination. I like driving. Aside from the physical aspect of “driving” my car, thrill of discovery is invigorating and I have learned that little discoveries are just as rewarding as big ones.

During the summer of 2008 Camilla and I put about 5000 miles under the wheels of our 11 year old car. Along with our grandson Cole we explored a lengthy swath of the Heartland…from Indiana we crossed the prairie state of Illinois, pausing at the Mississippi then onward through Iowa, and Nebraska. Through Nebraska we followed the general route of the Oregon Trail trying to imagine what those crossing the great plains in 1849 must have seen and felt.

This would be the place to pause for a brief editorial. Where we crossed the Prairie state of Illinois there was little evidence of the lush tall grass prairies that once extended from the Wabash River bottoms of western Indiana to the Mississippi and beyond. Where emigrants of 1849 crossed a vast grassland beyond the Mississippi that extended all the way to the Rocky Mountains there is little evidence of that once treeless landscape.  Nebraska is today less of a treeless landscape than it was when I passed through in 1959 as a child with my Grandparents. Today one has to drive well into western Nebraska before the trees fade away.

There is a lot of talk about the homogenization of American Culture over the past couple of generations. Most of that talk applies to things like national retail and restaurant chains. A shopping mall in Boise looks much like a shopping mall in Baton Rouge or Boston.  From what I have seen it should also apply to what we have done to our landscape. In our drive across Nebraska there was barely any difference in the amount of timber we saw between western Indiana where I live and the eastern 2/3 of Nebraska. Yet I remembered a Nebraska with considerably fewer trees than a typical Indiana landscape. I wonder if my memory is faulty? I might have been only about 10 the last time I crossed that state but I don’t remember it looking so much like home. I’m fairly certain emigrant travelers of 1849 would not have recognized much of the landscape we found in Nebraska this summer. Perhaps there are places in Nebraska that have not become so homogenized, but we did not see many of them on this trip.

As amazing as it sounds, there are a few places where you can still see traces of the old Oregon Trail. Scars, yet unhealed, in the land caused by thousands of iron clad wooden wagon wheels. Another small example of ways in which we have put our mark upon this land. 

Chimney Rock, Scotts Bluff, Windlass Hill, and Ash Hollow  are still easily spotted landmarks along the old Oregon Trail and the Platte River which much of the trail followed through Nebraska still winds it's way toward the sea as it did when the first settlers headed west in 1849. Although echos and reminders remain, the Great Plains have been long tamed. Fenced, plowed, and grazed and populated by towns large and small.  The vast grassland full of millions of bison are but a memory today, something we can only read about and imagine.

This is the history of America, we have changed the landscape from coast to coast, we have taken vast wealth from the lands with little thought of the future.  There are still public lands, and still wild places and some of those we have preserved, but it is always a fight and often preservation does not win.  Not long before he left office President Obama granted National Monument status to some public lands in Utah,  Bears Ears National Monument.  Mining, drilling and cattle interests are hopping mad and hope that the current administration will reverse that Monument status which would allow them access to take yet more wealth from those lands and forever change the landscape there as we have allowed in so many other places.  I hope those who value what we leave our grandchildren will prevail in the fight that is sure to come to Bears Ears National Monument in the near future.